Half Our Medical Treatments May or May Not Work
February 8, 2013
It seems like we should be past this point by now. The Washington Post reports, “Surprise! We Don’t Know if Half Our Medical Treatments Work.” Where are the big-data breakthroughs in this, one of humanity’s most crucial subject matters?
The British Medical Journal recently undertook a project called simply Clinical Evidence, which examined some 3,000 treatments that have been studied in controlled, randomized studies. For fully half, the studies are inconclusive. It is important to note that this doesn’t mean that half the time we are using treatments of unknown effectiveness, but rather that we don’t know the worth of half the number of treatments out there, including those rarely used. Still, that is a disturbing gap in our body of knowledge.
The report says the mystery-value treatments are those “for which there is insufficient data or data of inadequate quality.” That’s the part that is hard for me to wrap my head around. I guess the data management pros have some work to do in this area.
The lack of information can impact very concrete decisions. Writer Sarah Kliff reminds us:
“When health policy wonks talk about ending unnecessary care, they usually mean targeting these types of treatments — the ones where we have no idea whether they’re making us any healthier, but still increase spending.
“There are specific bodies dedicated to figuring out whether these 1,500 treatments actually work. That includes the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute, or PCORI, which was created by the health-care law to study comparative effectiveness research. . . . This Clinical Evidence research suggests they’ll have no shortage of medical treatments to study.”
Indeed. Let us hope our lack of intel does not send any hidden medical miracles into the dustbin of time.
Cynthia Murrell, February 08, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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